Cased Pipe Risk Assessment and Inspection for Gas LDCs

NYSEARCH/NGA has been addressing the issue of inspecting cased pipes for the last few years by advancing the development and validating technologies for anomaly investigation on cased pipes.  In addition to the advance of technology which continues to take time and funding, in 2007, the NGA Transmission Integrity Working Group and integrity engineers from some of the largest gas transmission/distribution companies have advanced a collective discussion on procedures and best practices and have indicated an interest and need for a third party risk assessment software tool for cased pipes.
The paper will describe the development of cased pipe risk assessment model by a team of corrosion and modeling experts and various LDCs around the country who are members of NYSEARCH. It will also cover the development of a miniature camera/crawler that can provide video inspection of the carrier pipe by attaching to the casing and maneuvering within the annular space.
Both projects have been underway since 2007 and are nearing completion. By early 2009, software testing and enhancements will have been completed on the risk model and in the case of the miniature casing camera, field testing will be completed and initial commercial service offerings are likely to be available.